Jinx monkey bomb, timelapse

Pre-Production

This project revolves around Jinx' monkey bomb, from the serie Arcane, by Fortiche and based on the universe of League of Legend, by Riot Games. Here i sought to work on Jinx psyche and her descent into madness. For that, I had to gather references based on warmer tones and calm atmosphere, and some more chaotic environment with artificial lighting.

Here they are, along with sketches done for some of the details and references collected for the texturing of the monkey.

Finally, the storyboard.

Modeling

For this step, I mainly used Maya and Zbrush ; with the shapes largely established in Maya, I transitioned to Zbrush for the finer details, like some of the veins of the wood on  head, arms, legs and outer body.

Texturing

Texturing was done, for most of the work, in Substance Painter, except for the cymbals, done in Maya. With a high poly version right out of Zbrush, it was possible for me to bake both the curvature and the ambient occlusion map, both useful for this project. All material were done manually, without generator except for the curvature and AO.

There wasn't that much paint on the clean version of the monkey, if any, so I settled for some cracked wood, and tried, for the metal, to get something clean, but not that much, that could visibly grow older in time ; as the monkey was made out of old junk found in a junkyard or something, it couldn't look like some material coming right out of the store.

For the environment, I gathered as much references as I could on Piltover council room, and all the metal parts contained in it.

Lighting

There had to be a real contrast between the beginning and the end of this project ; where the atmosphere is somewhat warm and calm, with yellow/ orange hues of late afternoon, the second atmosphere deals with severe tons of bright blue, pink and green. The end is chaotic, cut by glitches that come and go. While the monkey is surrounded by a soft light in the first part, by the second, it's showered in all those bright tones. The green in the background comes from below, creating a definitely unnatural environment in which the monkey finish its course.

By creating this contrast, I wanted to recreate Jinx descent into madness, from the uncertainty and naivety of youth, to her more messy persona later. Most of the environment dived deep into darkness, except for those metal parts I spoke about earlier, that reflect some of the lighting and create verticality.

Compositing

Added the defocus and some haze in Nuke. But mostly (appart from the work done on each shot), it was quite useful to add glitches as the final touch. On each shot, I separated the red, green and blue layer in shuffle to create some chromatic aberrations. Add to that an iDistort and a transform node, and it did the trick.